“The woman who was shot in the arm is going to make a full recovery,” Douglas says. “Theodor probably never had time to realize what was happening. But he leaves a wife and three children. I believe the youngest boy is only a month or two old.”
The pictures on his cell.
His children.
Good thing I didn’t look at them.
He could have prevented their dad’s death. He was the one who shot back at the window without thinking, thereby provoking Ingvar Stefansson into firing more shots.
Why?
Because you live the way you do, you fucking idiot. Because you take so many drugs that you aren’t in control of anything anymore.
“Have we got someone looking after his family?” Zack asks.
“They’ve got access to the best help available.”
They sit in silence for a moment.
Zack feels like sliding off his chair and lying on the floor. Crawling out of his own skin.
Douglas looks at him.
“Now tell me about Farsta,” he says.
His tone is neutral. Commanding, but not accusatory.
How can Douglas already know that I was there? Zack thinks.
Was he actually being followed?
Sten Westberg. Westberg must have called Douglas and told him to control his young subordinate. They acknowledged each other in the Opera Bar. They definitely did.
Zack thinks back to Westberg’s grin when he showed his police ID and told him his name. He must have known that Zack worked for Douglas, and that he could exploit that fact.
Zack does his best to appear untroubled. He just needs to find the right thread. How the hell did he end up in Farsta?
Ah, yes. Abdula. The Kaknäs Tower.
“I was given a name by a source, and I thought I’d check it out,” he begins.
He talks about the garage he went out to look at, about Mehmet Drakan’s reluctance to talk, and about the CEO of Merkantus suddenly showing up, claiming to be paying a car-repair bill.
Sitting on the chair is easier now he’s got something to concentrate on.
“You have to admit that it’s a bit odd. First his name appears on the lease agreements for several of the massage parlors we’re investigating, and then he turns up in a garage owned by a Turk with a criminal record, where there coincidentally also happens to be a bag full of cash. It’s obvious that he’s mixed up in all this.”
“I agree that it’s certainly an unusual coincidence. But sometimes that’s all it is: a coincidence. Is the car registered in his name?”
“Yes.”
Zack checked the car’s registration as soon as he bumped into Douglas down in the lobby. He had been hoping that the car belonged to someone else, someone who had no logical place among Westberg’s acquaintances. But that wasn’t the case. The Chevrolet had had four owners, but had been registered in Sten Westberg’s name for the past seven months.
“Well, from now on we’re dropping that and working with what we’ve already got,” Douglas goes on. “Forensics have started to go through Stefansson’s laptop and cell, and I’m expecting a preliminary report on what they’ve found shortly. We’ve got a number of massage parlors under observation, and we’re trying to identify which ones use staff from Burma. We’ve also received an anonymous tip-off about a small, ultrareligious sect that has resorted to extreme violence in the past to protest against sexual promiscuity. Apparently two leading members have been seen in Stockholm during the past week. I thought you could take a look at that.”
Zack is no longer listening. He’s wondering why Douglas doesn’t want to talk about Sten Westberg.
Because all the men in fancy suits protect each other.
But what’s the difference between their loyalty and mine and Abdula’s? Those of us who come from the sewers protect each other too.
“Here, Zack,” Douglas says, holding out a piece of paper with some names and ID numbers on it. Zack glances at the note and leaves the office.
He’s still got a job, but he’s being given crap to work on.
Has Douglas worked it out after all? Is this his way of punishing Zack?
* * *
DOUGLAS IS still sitting at his desk. He waits until Zack is out of sight.
Then he picks up his phone and dials a number.
50
HOME AGAIN.
Welcomed by nothing but countless dust balls.
No Ester in the stairwell.
He would have liked her to be there. Today he could cope.
But today she wasn’t there.
He’s alone with his dirt. Internal and external.
And he can’t even summon up the energy to deal with the external sort.
Zack hasn’t even got a proper vacuum cleaner, just a small one he sometimes uses to clean the table, or to suck up piles of dust he’s swept up with the broom. But even that was a long while ago now.
He often hears people say how nice it will be to get home again when they’ve been somewhere, but he’s never felt like that. Never ever.
Even when he and his dad were moving their furniture into the three-room apartment in Bredäng, he knew he would be leaving one day, and he never let go of that thought for as long as he lived there.
It’s the same with this apartment. He’s lived here for four years now, but it still doesn’t feel like home.
I ought to have a home, he thinks. Everyone should.
The way Abdula does. He says he could never leave Bredäng.
“Isn’t it about time you thought of moving into the city?” Zack asked him the last time he paid him a visit.
The old apartment block looked worse than ever. Graffiti-covered walls, stinking bags of garbage outside the door, and boarded-up windows in the basement where the glass had been kicked in.
But Abdula simply shook his head.
“This is my patch. You can’t just leave that behind.”
Zack knows what it’s about.
Identity.
A sense of belonging.
He’s seen it in plenty of guys from the suburbs. Maybe Sweden doesn’t feel like home. Nor does their parents’ homeland. But no one can take the place they grew up in away from them. It’s where they have their roots.
He thinks of Said, one of his childhood friends, who came from Skärholmen. He tattooed his postcode, 127 31, on his arm. That gave him a certain status, even with people who didn’t know him very well. The tattoo acted as a sort of mark of quality.
One hundred percent Skärholmen. No additives.
Even so, he can’t help getting fed up with all the suburban guys who feel obliged to sing the praises of their shitty little patches of territory. Who talk of concrete with love in their voices.
It’s all bullshit.
Zack isn’t sure he’ll ever find somewhere he can call home.
He pulls the blind down and shuts out the summer evening. Gets a Coke from the fridge. Downs it. Puts the empty can in the garbage, along with all the others.
He thinks about the garage in Farsta. How he threw that crushed can at the wall, how he swept through and wrecked the office.
He sits down on the sofa, but gets up almost immediately and starts walking around the living room.
He shouldn’t be a police officer. He’s no better than the people he tries to catch. Koltberg is right. He’s a fraud, who’s taken shortcuts through the hierarchy thanks to his mom.
He checked out the names on the note Douglas gave him. Obviously they turned out to be a dead loss. Just as he’d known they would. Not that it makes the blindest bit of difference now. It’s over. He’s failed.
He didn’t get fired today, but he will be soon. He’s not suited to be a police officer.
He’s known that all along, really. He felt it very strongly on his first day, when he walked through the doors of Police Headquarters to work his first shift after graduation.
He had enjoyed the training and had become good friends with several of the others on the co
urse. But when he found himself walking through the entrance that he’d scrawled graffiti on just a few years before, to become a proper police officer, he felt nothing but unease.
It was as if he had was going inside the building against his wishes. As some sort of punishment for past misdeeds.
He can clearly remember his thoughts at the time:
I don’t belong here. This isn’t the right place for me. What do I have to do to get out of here?
I have to solve Mom’s murder.
But there had been something else as well. Things that needed doing, but which he didn’t yet know about.
Truths to be uncovered.
Truths that were far bigger than him.
* * *
HE WALKS back and forth in the dusty apartment.
Knows there are pills hidden away that could bring him down in just a couple of minutes.
But he resists.
Enough already.
I can’t resist.
Then there’s a knock at the door. Three hesitant little knocks.
You’ve come after all.
You’re saving me. It ought to be the other way round.
“Hello.”
Her smile seems to fill her whole face, and she’s got her folder and a brown pencil case in her arms.
“Hello. Do you want to come in?”
“Yes, please.”
They sit down on the sofa and Ester puts the folder on the table.
“More homework? Isn’t that summer course over soon?” Zack asks.
“There’s one week left.”
“So what have you got to do for tomorrow, then?”
“Just some math. We’ve started to do area.”
“Is it hard?”
“No, it’s just multiplication, really. First you measure the two sides, then you multiply the number. And that gives you the answer. If it’s a rectangle, that is. If it isn’t, it gets a bit more complicated.”
“Why don’t you show me how to do it?”
She takes her math book out of the folder and opens her pencil case. She sharpens the pencil carefully in a little green pencil sharpener, then gets out a white eraser and a transparent ruler.
Everything in perfect condition. No teeth marks on the pencil, no bent corners on the book.
Zack remembers his own schoolbooks. Battered, covered with scribbles, their corners bent over. He always found the work easy, but he was ridiculously careless. He often left his books and other schoolwork at home. Or would turn up for school trips without a packed lunch and change of clothes.
His dad didn’t really have the energy to get involved.
He would have liked to, but couldn’t.
Like Ester’s mother.
But Ester probably doesn’t forget that sort of thing anyway.
Zack looks at her as she carefully measures the sides of a five-sided shape, then writes down the numbers on the lines beneath it.
As long as you can get through these years, he thinks. As long as you don’t end up with the wrong crowd.
Or get kidnapped and sold by criminals.
Locked away in a house in the forest.
With wolves.
“There,” she says a short while later. “I’m done now.”
“You made that look really easy,” Zack says.
She looks at him quizzically.
“Not that I’m surprised. Have you got any more homework?”
“No, I did the rest at school.”
“Do you want to watch a film?”
She gets out her cell, an old Nokia 5310, and looks at the time.
“No, I’ve got to go back up and make tea and sandwiches for us both. Mom’s probably awake now.”
She gives Zack a long hug on the sofa, and he hugs her back.
Then she picks up her folder and pencil case and leaves. Zack hears her footsteps in the stairwell and hopes that Veronica has woken up and feels up to spending some time with her daughter.
Then he gets a text from Fredrik Bylund.
Meet me at the Grand Hotel at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow morning.
Zack wonders why Bylund always wants to meet at such fancy places, and replies:
Sure. You’re paying.
He gets a smiley with devil’s horns in response.
Zack would rather have met up with him straightaway. He knows the newspapers sometimes receive tip-offs from people who for various reasons are reluctant to contact the authorities, and hopes that Bylund has something for him that can finally point them in the right direction.
But he doesn’t want to put pressure on the reporter. Better to let him establish the rules of the game.
Anyway, Zack needs to get some sleep.
He wishes Ester could have stayed. Then he’d almost certainly have fallen asleep on the sofa. He looks across at his hiding place. But, no, no more chemicals now. He doesn’t want to rinse the crap away with more crap.
He opts for a different method instead, one which is painful, but he knows he’ll feel better as a result when he wakes up.
He takes his jeans off and starts doing push-ups on the living-room floor. He keeps up a fast pace, his chest touching the floor each time he dips down.
After fifty push-ups he rolls onto his back and does some sit-ups. He tortures himself to do almost one hundred. Then he runs out of energy.
He brushes his teeth, pulls down the blind, and gets into bed.
Shuts his eyes.
And falls asleep instantly.
But, once again, sleep is no safe refuge. His dreams are full of snapping jaws in dark corridors, wolves howling, women’s legs torn apart, bullets penetrating skulls, and two boys at night in a summer meadow that smells of blood.
* * *
WHEN HE wakes up he doesn’t know where he is at first.
He reaches for his cell, which he’s left to charge: 1:17.
Friday now. But this crazy week is probably far from over.
It’s as if time has been compressed. So much has happened, his brain hasn’t managed to keep up.
He goes over to the window and opens the blind. The summer night is dark blue, and white pinpricks are shining faintly in the sky. He tries to find a constellation he hasn’t seen in a long time. It’s big, but indistinct, almost impossible to see with the naked eye. Especially in the city.
But he looks anyway. Searching for the four stars that form a shape that looks a bit like the Plow, then for the smaller stars that stick out like arms and legs.
Hercules.
A memory comes back to him. He’s somewhere in the countryside with his dad, who’s still healthy. It’s late August, and they’re standing outside in the dark, looking at all the stars.
Crickets are chirruping in the mild night, and his dad is crouching beside Zack, and has just pointed out Hercules to him.
“But why is he running, Dad? Is he frightened?”
“No, Hercules is brave. This constellation can be depicted in different ways, and some people see it the way you do, with two running legs. But Hercules is actually on his knees, raising his club, ready to tackle ever more dangerous creatures.”
Zack looks at the constellation for a long time. Then at all the other stars. It’s almost impossible to believe there are so many.
“Do you know how the stars were created?” his dad asks a little while later.
“No.”
“Well, when Hercules was a baby he was placed next to the goddess Hera to suckle while she was asleep, but she woke up and pushed him away, and the milk that spurted out formed the Milky Way.”
Zack looks at him.
“Not really, though?”
His dad smiles at him.
“Everyone’s free to believe whatever they like.”
Zack looks up at the stars again. His dad but his arm around him, and Zack wishes they never had to go back indoors again.
* * *
IN A forest some distance northwest of Stockholm, the stars are shining considerably brighter than in the city. Th
e dark outline of a large barn sticks up among the fir trees and undergrowth. Beside it stands a smaller farmhouse, its lights still on.
Some men are walking toward the barn from the house. The glow of a cigarette is clearly visible in the darkness, and the animals begin to bark as they hear the voices.
Fredrik Bylund hears the old door open, hears the stairs creak beneath the men’s weight, and then sees three faces staring down at him from some sort of loft. The men talk to each other in low voices, and one of them laughs.
Bylund tries to move, but his chained wrists and ankles are already scraped and bleeding, and he has no energy left.
He can’t even summon up the strength to cry for help anymore.
One of the men goes off. He hears footsteps on the stairs again, then a scraping sound, and Bylund sees a large hatch in the wall slowly open.
The animals’ growling and barking becomes more intense.
What’s going on? What the fuck is going on?
The hole in the wall gets bigger, the wolves rush into the room, and he screams louder than he ever has in his life.
* * *
THE SCREAMING.
There it is again.
Far away. Yet close at the same time.
Sanda Moe starts to sing in a trembling voice, so Than Than Oo won’t hear the faint sound reaching them through the damp walls of the cellar. She strokes her cheeks and lets her hand linger intentionally for a few seconds over her ear.
Than Than Oo’s forehead is wet with sweat. She’s lying on a dirty mattress on the floor, trying to breathe through the pain of the cramps. They’re coming close together now.
Twelve-year-old Tin Khaing is crouched between her spread legs, ready to help the baby out.
Sanda Moe speaks softly to Than Than Oo. “It’s going to be fine. You’re strong.”
She knows no one is going to rescue them.
They were doomed even when they were in Burma.
Maybe even in the camp on the other side of the border.
Than Than Oo screams out loud when the first real contraction starts.
That’s good, Sanda Moe thinks. Let the scream of life drown out the scream of death.
Zack Page 30
